GENI Racks Administration

This page describes GENI racks administrative tasks and duties associated with each task. For each rack type, a site contact coordinates delivery, installation, configuration, and maintenance of the rack. In this very important role, you can rely on GPO support. Please contact us at ​help@geni.net for any questions. The GPO also provides a real-time public IRC chat room where engineers are often available, chat.freenode.net channel #geni, for debugging any issues you may encounter. See HowTo/ConnectToGENIChatRoom for details.

Site Requirements and Rack Installation

The site contact works with the organization deploying the rack (GPO, RENCI or HP) to get get the rack (Starter, InstaGENI or ExoGENI, respectively) and site requirements for their specific site networks defined. The site requirements include:

Network Setup - Define how the rack will connect to the Internet and to the GENI backbones. Ex Regional connections, connection speed, VLANs to be used, etc.

Address assignment for rack components - Define which addresses, subnet masks, and routes need to be configured for the rack components.

Power requirements - Define which PDU and related power equipment matches on site power availability

Administrative accounts - Setup site administrator accounts and other accounts that may be needed to manage access to the rack resources. Sites can choose to operate without administrator accounts if they prefer that option, and administrative responsibility will be delegated to a GENI operations group.

Delivery logistics - Details for where the rack is to be delivered, who will accept the delivers, and when the delivery will take place. Also covers identifying and plannign for any physical restrictions for the rack delivery.

Do not run interactive sessions as root (don't use sudo bash, but instead run individual commands under sudo for logging).

Do not share account credentials. We are happy to create individual accounts, or to give staffers who don't have logins access to our emergency account for outage debugging.

GPO staffers actively manage these systems using the puppet configuration management utility. If you need to modify a system, please e-mail us at ​gpo-infra@geni.net to ensure that the desired change takes effect.

2. Login to the VMs. When connecting to your image you must use the private key from the Eucalyptus keypair you created above. The -i flag lets you specify the private key. Each image also has a specified username that you will use on instances. In the case of the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) image, the username is "ubuntu". So the complete ssh command for this image is:

Install a VM image on your Starter rack

The following procedure outlines an experimenter view into using the Starter racks Eucalyptus VMs as a resource for an experiment.

To request an account for a GENI Starter Rack send an email request to ​gpo-infra@geni.net including the following details:

Preferred username and full name.

Public SSH public key for remote login into rack resources.

Provide an MD5 hash of the password for sudo use. Generated by openssl passwd -1

Install Euca2ools (where???), which are command-line tools for interacting with the Eucalyptus open-source cloud-computing infrastructure.

$ sudo apt-get install euca2ools

Install Euca credentials. These credentials can be downloaded as a package from your Eucalyptus web site. If you do not have an account you can request one at ???? Once the account is verified and approved, go to the "Credentials" tab. In the "Credentials ZIP-file" section, click on the "Download Credentials" button. Locate the downloaded zip file (the location depends on your OS and web browser) and move it to a working directory.